The present invention generally relates to electronic radios and, more particularly, to a mobile weather band radio for providing weather messages, emergency messages, and other information.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been providing a weather band radio broadcast service in the United States for many years. The NOAA weather radio (NWR) service provides continuous weather and emergency related updates to local geographic regions. The NOAA weather radio service provides weather-related warnings and serves as a broadcast warning system for other emergency messages about events that may threaten life and/or property. To receive weather band broadcast service information, a specially designed receiver is generally required to tune to the weather band broadcast. Currently, the NOAA weather band broadcast transmissions include seven narrow band frequency modulated (FM) channels in the very high frequency (VHF) band ranging from 162.400 to 162.550 kHz, with a 25 kHz channel separation between adjacent channels. The seven channels are broadcast from transmitters located in various geographic regions and the signals for multiple channels often overlap. Accordingly, it is possible to tune a weather band radio to receive a plurality of weather band channels from one location.
Recently, NOAA has added digital voice synthesis which allows for faster distribution of emergency updates, in contrast to analog voice recordings. Moreover, NOAA has also added Specific Area Message Encoding (SAME) which provides digital information indicative of the geographic region covered by the accompanying message. Currently, the geographic regions are typically defined by counties. This allows for weather band receivers to filter out messages that do not pertain to a selected geographic region. In general, the NOAA weather radio transmitter devoted to a given geographic area may not provide the strongest signal with the best reception that is available at certain locations in its coverage area. As a consequence, by simply tuning to the station having the strongest signal, a radio user may miss those messages pertaining to the geographic region of interest.
The use of the SAME message generally allows for receipt of only those messages in a selected geographic area. The weather band radio must include decoding circuitry capable of decoding the SAME digital message. In addition, a geographic identification code generally is used to identify the county of interest, and the code must be manually input into the decoding circuitry to configure the radio for the geographic area of interest. Once configured, the weather band radio will respond only to those messages associated with the selected geographic identification code, and may ignore alert messages which do not pertain to the selected region of interest. For home-based weather band radios, the SAME message is satisfactory since the location of the radio is generally fixed. However, when the weather band radio is transported from one geographic coverage region to another geographic coverage region, the weather band radio generally must be reprogrammed by the user. This reprogramming drawback becomes particularly significant when a weather band radio is used in a mobile vehicle, such as an automobile, which frequently travels amongst various geographic counties. Accordingly, it is therefore desirable to provide for a weather band radio which offers dynamic updating to adjust for geographic location.
In accordance with the teachings of the present invention, a radio and method of providing radio messages with geographic based messaging is provided. The radio includes a receiver for receiving broadcast radio signals containing a message and a corresponding geographic identifier. The radio includes a device for determining a current position of the radio. Also included are geographic identifiers and electronic map data, preferably stored in memory, for defining geographic regions corresponding to the geographic identifiers. A controller determines which one of the geographic identifiers corresponds to the determined current position, and further performs an operation when the determined geographic identifier corresponds to the received geographic identifier.
According to the preferred embodiment, the radio is particularly well suited for use as a weather band radio for providing weather and emergency messages and emergency alert signals. The present invention advantageously allows for receipt of those messages that are intended to cover the location of the radio, while ignoring messages not of interest. According to other embodiments, the radio may further provide messages for an upcoming and/or surrounding geographic regions, and may track the message""s expiration time.
These and other features, advantages and objects of the present invention will be further understood and appreciated by those skilled in the art by reference to the following specification, claims and appended drawings.